Rather than remove the waste, the government built a 75-foot-tall mound, covered in rock, to serve as a permanent disposal cell for much of the waste. The government cleanup of Weldon Spring is complete, but the site is considered permanently damaged and will require oversight into perpetuity. took hazardous leached barium sulfate from Latty Avenue to the West Lake Landfill, also in Bridgeton. In 1973, the uranium processor Cotter Corp. Tons of that nuclear waste flowed into Coldwater Creek, contaminating the often-flooding waterway and adjacent yards for 14 miles, state and federal investigators determined. Storage was so haphazard that even the path to the site was contaminated by trucks that spread waste on their hauls from 1966 to 1969. Radioactive barrels lay outside the fence. in nearby Bridgeton, piling it in a heap, the commission said at the time. In 1966, the Atomic Energy Commission demolished and buried buildings at the airport site. So the waste moved to new sites, contaminating more land, near more people. The rest of the Weldon Spring site was added two years later.Īlison Carrick, co-director of “The First Secret City,” a documentary about the region’s nuclear history, said after the war some companies thought that byproducts of the radioactive material could be sold.īut that didn’t work. Radioactive waste contaminated the area, including a large quarry that eventually became a Superfund cleanup site in 1987.
In 1957, the Atomic Energy Commission opened a plant in Weldon Spring and Mallinckrodt moved its uranium processing there. Production there ended in 1945, but not before soil, sediments and some springs were contaminated. Meanwhile, starting in 1941, the government began making explosives at a new plant in Weldon Spring. In 1946, the government bought land near the airport and began trucking nuclear waste from the Mallinckrodt facility. 7, 1941, Mallinckrodt began processing uranium near downtown. Just months after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. “This is an enterprise of heavy industry,” said Gwendolyn Verhoff, a historian at St. was a major processor of the element into a concentrated form that could be further refined elsewhere into the material that made it into weapons. Louis area involved uranium, where Mallinckrodt Chemical Co. Louis was part of a geographically scattered national effort to build a nuclear bomb that was tested in Los Alamos, New Mexico. “We are a national sacrifice zone,” she said. What it did find were repeated instances where companies, contractors or the government could have addressed significant problems but didn’t.ĭawn Chapman of the activist group Just Moms STL - a group pushing for cleanup and federal buyouts in an area near the airport - said the region “saved our country” with its work on the nuclear program but paid a terrible cost. The AP review didn’t uncover evidence of criminal wrongdoing.
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